In an elevator system the travel of the elevators is controlled on the basis of elevator calls. The giving of calls is conventionally arranged by disposing up/down buttons on each floor of the building, by means of which an arriving elevator customer expresses his/her desired direction of travel. Additionally, a control panel customized to the disposal location of the elevator system is needed in the elevator car, on which control panel the elevator passenger presses the pushbutton according to his/her desired destination floor. With a conventional call-giving method an elevator customer must therefore give two calls. First the elevator must be called to the floor on which the customer is located with one press of a call pushbutton. In addition to this, a second press of a call pushbutton is needed in the elevator car.
Since buildings are individual in terms of the number of floors they have and of their floor markings or floor designations, an individually fabricated car control panel according to each building is needed in each elevator car of the building. Owing to the abundance of different options and, on the other hand, the physical presence of the panel, i.e. the multitude of pushbuttons and wirings, this type of control panel for calls is an expensive component.
The call method in which an elevator passenger selects his/her destination floor already in the elevator lobby outside the elevator is called destination allocation. In this way the aforementioned problem of high costs becomes emphasized, because each floor of a building in this case needs its “own car panel”, which contains call pushbuttons corresponding to all the floors of the building that need to be served. The quantity of call panels per delivery in high-rise buildings is large and the costs can increase to become very large.
One option for call panels to be disposed on a floor is a keypad, which is of the telephone keypad type with number buttons from zero to nine. The downside of this solution is that in this case the building cannot contain floors designated with letter markings, of the type that can be e.g. B (basement); the use of this type of keypad is also rather laborious.
One option is to use two buttons for giving the desired call, with one of which the call number list can be scrolled forwards one floor number at a time and with the other correspondingly backwards. In addition, this type of call-giving system needs an accept button, with which the desired call data can be sent to the control system. This type of method is, however, impractical in high-rise buildings. If, for example, an elevator customer while on the ground floor wants to go to floor 30, he/she must press the button scrolling forwards 30 times and after this the accept button.